One Night in Copan Page 12

  Max’s story has an uncanny, fragmented Biblical texture, not unlike the New Testament’s clashing renderings of the Jesus of Nazareth mythicized decades apart by biased and unreliable biographers, or the multi-angled perspectives of a crime observed by different eyewitnesses in the Japanese cinematic masterpiece, Rashomon. Somewhere between the lionizing and the demonizing and the blasphemy emerges a portrait of Max everyone seems to recognize.

  “I knew Max from my very earliest days. We were neighbors. To call him eccentric is to cheapen the uniqueness of his idiosyncrasies. He was a collector-turned-hoarder. He collected stamps, books, magazines, but his real interest was wild life -- dogs, cats, fish, birds, reptiles. He raised a caiman in his bathtub until it became deformed and grew into a U-shaped monster. His real love was birds; a strange passion for a man who kept wild fowls such as moorhens, budgies, grass finches and parrotlets in captivity when they clearly belonged in the wild. He may have very nearly and singlehandedly driven the island’s parrotlet population to extinction. He was a wildfowler, addicted to the swamp life who exulted during the migratory season when he could shoot various species of North American shore birds headed south for the winter. He was up before dawn in the swamp waiting for the sandpipers to fly in.

  “I owe him my life. One day -- I was fourteen -- I joined him at the swamp. As I attempted to cross a stream, I stepped into quicksand. I was making my last gurgling sounds as I sank beneath the mire when Max turned around and pulled me out by my hair. Yet he had a violent temper and once aimed his loaded shotgun at me. I still wonder why he didn’t pull the trigger; that had been the intent I’d read in his eyes.

  “When Max could no longer fend for himself he was removed from his house and taken to a cottage in the country. What we found in his once-pristine abode was worse than the Augean Stables. Books and magazines were stacked to the ceiling; the stench of rotting food, of decomposing flesh permeated the house with that unmistakable redolence of death.

  “His dark side had its own validity. I witnessed his bouts of extreme temper. He was fascinated by living things; he could have been a gifted naturalist. Yet he did perplexing and contradictory things with the animals and birds he kept. The caiman he raised in his bathtub grew so deformed that it had to be euthanized. He was also quite territorial and demonstrated this in ways that are remembered as part of the legend of Max. He captured moorhens in the swamp by stripping naked and wrapping his head in a bundle of weeds and water lilies, and slowly moving on the unsuspecting birds. Once, a group of women from the old white plantocracy were picnicking on a grassy verge in the swamp. Resenting the intrusion, Max resorted to his ‘Apocalypse Now’ guerrilla tactics. Disguised as a floating aquatic plant, he slid quietly through the water and suddenly emerged, a nude Medusa-like apparition. Startled, the women fled the scene, screaming.”

  A more laconic portrayal by another acquaintance of his is no less revealing.

  “Max suffered from chronic headaches. For twenty years or so he took large doses of Valium. He also abused other drugs, recreationally or to quiet the demons that consumed him. Most people only knew Max the swamp shooter and the animal collector, but not the man. Many held a slanted perspective, more the result of hearsay than direct experience. Others perpetuated the myths that evolved with the passing of time. Yes, he was strange, unconventional and unpredictable. He did a lot of ‘shite’ and it was easier for people to dismiss him as a madman than as a troubled soul.”

  A family friend’s frosty ruminations -- shared thirteen years after his death but focusing on the last days of his life -- betray a curious lack of empathy:

  “Max was a good talker but he was unable or unwilling to do normal things, like shave or get a haircut. He mishandled money. He collected animals but after a while he stopped caring for them. We found dozens of mangy and starving dogs in the yard. The cellars crawled with starving cats and dying birds. The fish tanks, once pristine and thriving with life, reeked with dead fish. The cupboards were bare and what little food we found in the refrigerator had long since rotted away. He was committed to a mental hospital. He was released six months later and he went back to getting high on ‘whizz’ [amphetamines]. He spent most of his weekly allowance on cigarettes and valium. He gambled the rest away.”

  Terse and non-committal is this gem from left field offered by a former schoolmate:

  “Max liked poetry. His favorite was Alfred Noyes’ The Highwayman. He knew it by heart. No wonder. He had to write it five hundred times as punishment in school for some transgression.”

  Yes, I saw Max’s dark side, but I also knew a man who struggled to fit in without having to submit to other people’s conformist expectations, to comprehend the world around him by avoiding its most flagrant contradictions. None of us is universally liked. Unconventional ideas and behavior in the very straight-laced “Little England” ambience of “Stonewall” must surely have set tongues wagging, caused friction, pitted fans and detractors.

  Asking too many questions on a small island that pulls in its sidewalks at dusk and spends the night gossiping about friend, kin and foe is as foolhardy as it is pointless. Efforts to shed light on the dimmest features of a terrorist incident that would invite international condemnation required that I settle on the fragmentary details I was able to exhume from a mass grave of cover-ups, half-truths, hearsay, gossip and lies.

  What I learned has since entered the public domain: On October 6, 1976, eleven minutes after takeoff from Barbados, Jamaica-bound Cubana Flight 455 exploded at 18,000 feet. All 78 people on board were killed in what was then the deadliest terrorist airline attack in the Western hemisphere.

  Evidence implicated several CIA-linked anti-Castro Cuban exiles and members of the Venezuelan secret police. Declassified CIA documents indicate that the agency “had concrete advance intelligence … on plans by Cuban exile terrorist groups to bring down a Cubana airliner.”

  Four men were arrested and tried in Venezuela: Freddy Lugo and Hernán Ricardo Lozano were sentenced to 20-year prison terms. CIA operative Orlando Bosch was acquitted on technical grounds and pardoned despite objections by President H. W. Bush’s own Defense Department which insisted that Bosch was one of the most deadly terrorists working “within the hemisphere.” He died in Florida in April 2011.

  Luis Posada Carriles was held for eight years while awaiting final sentence. He managed to escape and entered the U.S., some say, with the help of CIA cronies who bribed Venezuelan authorities. He was held on charges of entering the U.S. illegally and released. Attempts to extradite him were obstructed by then CIA director George H. W. Bush. Posada had a long relationship with the CIA. In 1961 he joined the agency’s Brigade 2506 assigned to invade Cuba. He has since been involved in numerous anti-Cuban plots, including the attempted murder of Fidel Castro, the bombing of the British West Indian Airways office in Barbados and the Guyanese Embassy in Trinidad. Posada lives in Miami and is said to receive a $300 monthly “pension” from the CIA, which still considers him of “operational interest.” He remains actively involved with right-wing anti-Castro fund-raising groups.

  What I could not authenticate was inferred from precedent, circumstantial evidence and the laws of probability. When all else fails, filling in the blanks by reading between the lines is the only way to unearth truths that would otherwise remain entombed.

  Last, what LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MAX attempts to convey is the woeful inaptness of western man to the torpid cadences of life in the tropics, to the provincialism and pettifoggery, the dogmatism and the clannishness, how susceptible he is to the creeping “bestial affliction” of boredom in the very bosom of paradise and why, over time, he cannot seem to surmount it by any act of will. Too much sun makes people horny. It also predisposes them to indolence, apathy and a diminished sense of urgency or commitment. Also, being white in a predominantly black society no longer ruled by its colonial masters must have its downsides, frustrations and fears. Though Max often expressed grave misgivings about the future of �
�Stonewall,” they were mercifully devoid of the veiled but pernicious racism of his fellow whites.

  “Stonewall” is a lovely place to visit. I don’t see great minds germinating in its lush and colorful setting.

  What with its cryptic undertones, allusions and timeline inversions, composing LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MAX was especially challenging. I am deeply indebted to Peter Reece, Frances Roman and Prof. Karl Watson for their keen sense of recall, their incisive reminiscences and dispassionate elucidations.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Whoever yearns for freedom, justice, and peace

  may rise again and raise his head,

  for in Christ liberation is drawing near.

  Luke (21:28).

  Somehow, that 2,000-year-old pledge turned out to be an empty, cruel ruse. The “Savior” has saved nothing. Convulsing under rising waves of hatred, ignorance, superstition and stupidity, racked by mounting violence, the world still awaits salvation -- from itself. In defiance of halfhearted reprimands by the “First World,” racked by poverty, despair, ethnic strife and shifting allegiances, “emergent nations” continue to indulge in genocide. Generation after generation, desperately in need of social justice, economic equilibrium and independence from their puppet-masters, wallowing in apathy and inertia, they teeter on the brink of civil war or have succumbed to it. In other parts of the world people struggle to preserve increasingly shrinking fragments of their ancestral homelands. Climate change puts arctic regions on thin ice, threatens to inundate coastal areas and engulf dozens of islands around the globe, while prairies wither and turn into dustbowls. Embroiled in unwinnable wars, itching for more, the U.S. clings to the two-party-system -- both parties the flip sides of the same tarnished coin, both indistinguishable one from the other except for the partisanships and antipathies they inspire, both tied to corporate wealth, both intent on blocking meaningful reform in the name of Wall Street-dictated crony capitalism, both involved in larceny against the poor.

  The gap between the haves and the have not continues to widen. The Catholic Church, the richest empire on earth and the self-anointed moral arbiter to millions, is embroiled in sordid scandals. Living in Babylonian splendor, donning richly festooned vestments, basking in the idolatrous reverence of the flock, the Pope breathes the rarefied air of his own saintly afterlife and sneers at men’s earthly needs. Meanwhile, intoxicated by the apocalyptic rants found in Revelation, Evangelical Christians pray for an all-consuming Armageddon.

  The crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth is a fitting metaphor for man’s inhumanity. Alas, its commemoration reminds us all that salvation -- like justice, human rights, compassion, ethics and love -- remains a distant vision, not a serious objective.

  History is written and retouched by men. One man’s truth is another man’s propaganda. The allure of history rests not always in the events it chronicles but in the chronicler’s subjective interpretations. Without such ‘embroidery,’ the annals of man would consist of little more than a laconic compendium of facts and dates. Whereas some social scientists tend to interpret history as an evolution from savagery to emotional maturity and intellectual refinement, reality is far less reassuring. In the aggregate, human society seesaws wildly between states of stagnancy, feverish creativity, uneasiness, turmoil and madness. While these oscillations can be blamed on the cretins, killers and kleptocrats we elect (or surrender to), they are hastened, prolonged and fossilized by the appalling lethargy of the populace. As Voltaire wrote, ‘history is a lie commonly agreed upon’.” Yes, victors write history to justify and exalt conquest, losers to mitigate defeat. Neither side will concede the other’s account. The hostility such divergence of opinion invites leads to other assaults, further setbacks.

  In a story, as in a revolution, the most difficult part to invent is the end. In addition to bringing their own knowledge of history, story-tellers must own up to it: an ending is not supposed to be a surprise. To envision a plausible finale we must also reflect on the paroxysms of lunacy and violence that now convulse the planet.

  THE END STORY

  “On that day, dust possesses the earth; on that day,

  a blight is on the face of the earth; on that day,

  a cloud arises; on that day, things fall to ruin;

  on that day, the tender leaf

  is destroyed; on that day, the dying eyes are closed….”

  The Popol Vuh

  Ongoing military conflicts around the world have claimed more than four million lives, civilian and military, in the past 20 years. They continue to result in violent deaths in Afghanistan and Syria, Colombia and Somalia, Mexico and Sudan. Insurgencies and sectarian rivalries in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America killed another million people. Five million lives were lost during the Korean War; almost half that many in Vietnam.

  One facet of madness is the will to kill for an idea. Technology just makes men more efficient and choleric killers.

  The prognosis is poor. Other wars are looming. Some will be too close for comfort. They will be preceded by a salvo of official declarations and counter-statements tailored to help adversaries save face at home while giving the rest of the world the impression that a global conflagration is inevitable unless one side or the other relents.

  War is a lucrative pursuit, especially for the war mongers, the bankers and the gun merchants, but they often erupt as a result of baseless fear, miscalculation or overreaction, not conscious design. No one really wants war and no one is quite prepared to wage it, let alone win it. In time, words get sharper, less conciliatory, and weapons, the antithesis of reason, grow deadlier with each sound bite.

  A number of wise men whose opinion no one seeks suggest that the capacity to annihilate one another discourages rivals from slugging it out, thus justifying the escalation of that capacity to exponential thresholds. They call it mutually assured destruction; MAD for short. Everyone finds it an amusing little acronym. Few understand the implications.

  Other wise men liken hatred to an energy that can’t be compressed indefinitely and which must be vented from time to time, thus making a random skirmish, in insurrection, an all-out war, a holocaust a routine if somewhat inelegant necessity, like farting. Subconsciously, humans crave war, the wise men argue. Catharsis or reflex, war helps shake off the unbearable burden of having to fake civility, simulate enlightenment in a world cyclically shamed by ignorance, stupidity, clouded judgment, madness and violence. Wired as he is, the “naked ape” can’t forever conceal his homicidal instincts. He needs a user-friendly outlet for his wickedness. Dreaming is not enough.

  And so the rhetoric of war escalates in tone and intensity. No one protests very loudly. Not a single voice rises against the demagogues who beat the drums of war. No one dares send to hell the politicians who cheer it on, the economists who justify it, the bankers who finance it, the industries that thrive on it and the generals who prosecute it -- while the rest of us schmucks are forced-marched to the front to die, be maimed or driven crazy in the name of some elusive grand cause. Even the professional dissenters, doctrinaire and often deluded, keep quiet, their intellects anesthetized, their vocal cords deadened by fear or waning conviction. A malignant tedium, a pervasive apathy -- compensated by a lust for blood, anyone’s blood -- has replaced common sense.

  The late Samuel Huntington was right: When dissimilar ideologies collide or hegemonic interests diverge, pitting cultures against one another, conflicts erupt. The “low-intensity” conflicts that now thunder across the globe confirm the Harvard scholar’s thesis. Western (primarily American) imperialistic arrogance, rising Islamic self-identity, overpopulation, spreading poverty and hunger, all have carved an intractable and widening rift between ideological and cultural opposites.

  Torn by decades of civil strife, diminishing civil liberties, corruption and dwindling natural resources, some countries will fall first like gangrenous limbs in an orgy of blood-letting that turns the rivers red and meadows into open graves.

  Unable to trade wit
h impoverished client states and spurned by their former political partners, some nations crumble under the weight of their own spectacular if short-lived economic gigantism. Self-absorbed, mired in ethnic violence, other nations restart wars they did not have the courage to eschew or end. Isolated and moribund, others yet collapse in a final spasm of paranoia.

  In the Middle East, the predictable collapse of a shaky forty-year alliance between two Arab States, a territorially partitioned Palestine and their perennial enemy, Israel, sets the region ablaze. Militarily worn out, economically drained and exasperated by its prevarications and obstructionist policies, the U.S. abandons Israel to its fate. Willful and incorrigible, now armed with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, Iran stands poised to launch its long-range surface-to-surface missiles.

  Dismembered, smoldering and reduced to rubble by religious strife and half a century of U.S. occupation and economic colonialism, Iraq threatens to blow up. A fraudulently elected president had bulldozed America into an undeclared, costly, unpopular, bloody and unwinnable war premised on counterfeit assumptions against an enemy fathered and long coddled by the U.S. Saddam, it will be remembered, had been Uncle Sam’s Man in Baghdad until he defied his puppet master’s authority. No one in America flinched when this thug massacred thousands of his own people. A dozen warlords, each with an ax to grind, now control small enclaves of half-starving and venal mercenaries, and the debacle lingers on as the U.S. lets itself be dragged into yet another Middle Eastern crusade that dangerously compromises its military capital and lays waste to America’s gutted economy.